Gone Home, a “story exploration” video game for PCs coming out later this year, is just too cool not to share with y’all! The game, set in 1995, moves through the house of teenage riot grrrl Sam Greenbriar and her family, who have all mysteriously disappeared. Sam’s story unfolds through art, zines, and music, which is cool enough on its own, but this week the gamer blog Joystiq announced that Gone Home’s soundtrack will feature original music by the pioneering riot grrrl bands Heavens to Betsy and Bratmobile. I can’t wait for the release!

I’ve yet to see Spring Breakers, but I feel like there’s already enough press about it to make up an entire semester’s curriculum for a college course called something like “Deconstructing Shots of Neon Boobs.” Here is a Huffington Post link, which will bring you to a ton of other Spring Breakers-related links. Here is a piece from Slate about how the movie treats its black characters. And here is a video of Spring Breakers star Selena Gomez dissing Justin Bieber on Letterman. OMG, SHE’S SO SASSY AND SMART. I love JB, but I like to imagine their relationship had a kind of Tracy Jordan/Liz Lemon dynamic, with her having to continually remind him what it means to be polite and tactful and stuff, and him asking for snacks and trying to get secret boob action mid-hug.

Pointing out the continued and obvious omission of women of color on fashion runways is a pretty infuriating thing to have to do in 2013, when a lot of people act like we’ve solved the problem of racism forever, yay! One glance at any fashion magazine will tell you that women of color are still underrepresented in advertisements and features. Non-white models were almost completely missing from the fall 2013 runway shows that happened over the past couple months, and this week Buzzfeed posted statements from a few of fashion’s top casting directors about why that was the case. Sure, a collection is the designer’s vision, but a huge team—casting directors included—generally executes that vision. I’m mostly disappointed with their responses, particularly the way so many of them referred to race as “trendy” (gross). Some of the casting directors did stump for diversity, including James Scully, who selects models for designers including Stella McCartney, Lanvin, and Jason Wu. “A mix of diversity makes the show and clothes more interesting,” he said—then sort of left it at that. Contrary to popular belief, diversity doesn’t happen because you want it to, but because you actively work to make it happen. Surely the fashion industry can do better.

Last Sunday’s verdict in the Steubenville, Ohio case—in which two teenage boys were found guilty of raping a 16-year-old girl who was unconscious—has given rise to a lot of voices as people try to work through their feelings, most of which are some form of anger. Anger at media outlets that focused on and showed compassion for the rapists and not the victim. Anger at Steubenville’s residents, many of whom turned on the victim when she implicated two of their high-school sports stars. Anger that we live in a culture that can refuse to take rape victims seriously or actively work to prevent rape from happening in the first place. Roxane Gay, a writer and all-around marvel, used empathy to frame the Steubenville case and the reactions to it in this intelligent and thoughtful essay. It reminded me that empathy is sometimes tricky, and that my role in a movement for progressive change is not always easy.

Sandy

The letter Calliope Wong received this month from Smith College.

Calliope Wong, a friend from my Connecticut high school, is applying to colleges and universities. She fell in love with Smith College, an all-girls school in Massachusetts, and applied—only to have Smith return her application. Twice. Why, you might ask? Well, Calliope is male-to-female trans*. Smith wouldn’t consider her as a prospective student because her application for federal student aid says she’s male, which is a label that’s unlikely to change unless she undergoes sex-reassignment surgery. After Smith returned her application the first time, Calliope rallied the school to accept students like her on her Tumblr, (wisely) explaining that being required to undergo genital surgery in one’s late teens is “unreasonable and not modeled on the real life struggles of transwomen.” Her application to the school was returned a second time earlier this month, but she hasn’t given up yet. This week she vowed to keep pressuring Smith, for her own admission and “for the transwomen to come, who should inherit a better and more just system.”

Lena S.

Daisy Morris, dinosaur discoverer.

Four years ago, fossil enthusiast Daisy Morris, then four years old, saw what she believed was a dinosaur bone on the beach near her home in England. This week, the whole world learned she was right all along when a scientific paper officially announced her discovery of an approximately 125-million-year-old species of flying reptile. To honor her contribution to paleontology, scientists named the dinosaur Vectidraco daisymorrisae. In a video clip from the BBC, a grown-man fossil hunter admits he’s “a little bit jealous because it should’ve been [him] that found it,” and the presenter says Daisy was “in the right place at the right time.” But Daisy’s mom says Daisy had been fossil hunting since she was three, and that was exactly what she was doing the day she found a fossil. That doesn’t sound like a coincidence at all. ♦

23 Comments

raggedyanarchyMarch 23rd, 20131:08 PM

Daisy Morris is so cute! So jealous….I used to scour hiking trails and rocks for fossils when I was little, but I never found anything other than those little sea-creature fossils found in gravel. And of course some old man has to try and discredit her achievement.

Going Home sounds like a great video game, and I’m totally loving the mixed-media style!

I have to admit I hadn’t hear about the Steubenville rape, and just spent an hour scouring articles about it. So gross. I can’t believe people still react in a way that favors the rapists over the victim. No one is EVER asking for it.

Good luck Calliope!!! I’m not religious so I don’t pray but I will definitely be crossing my fingers for you. I really hope Smith realizes that government forms cannot possibly capture a real person and that you should be able to go there!

I used to go to Smith and I just wanted to point out that for legal reasons, people who are legally male cannot go there. It has something to do with federal funding, and I’m embarrassed that I don’t know the actual details, but I know that Smith legally cannot accept Calliope.

I think it is a really shitty situation and I think she definitely deserves to get in. Smith also has a history of treating trans* students disrespectfully that I think they need to amend. Dean Shaver’s response was totally inappropriate and I wish she had sent Calliope a nicer letter explaining more clearly why she can’t attend Smith instead of blatantly insulting her.

So it’s a complicated situation. The administration should have handled it better, and there needs to be some kind of larger-scale change so trans* students can attend Smith, but they can’t accept her for legal reasons, not solely out of bigotry. Here’s hoping that the administration learns a lesson from this ordeal and that in the future anybody who wants to Smith can go there. I know the students are all in solidarity with Calliope.

Those responses from the casting directors in the Buzzfeed article were just horrible. The directors probably didn’t even realize how racist their statements were. But what I found most disturbing was that I found their statements offensive but not shocking. Even though a lot of progress has been made on the diversity front, everyone, not just the fashion industry, still has a long way to come.

And little Daisy is so cute! Such a great achievement and no one should take that away from her. She found the fossil so she deserves to have it named after her.

In regards to the awful Steubenville rape trial, youtubers, Laci Green and Hayley G Hoover both made marvellous videos expressing the outrage they felt surrounding the issue.
In Hayley’s video, she explains how women have the power to say no and gives a variety of examples of situations.

“Contrary to popular belief, diversity doesn’t happen because you want it to, but because you actively work to make it happen. ”

I’ve been thinking a lot about diversity recently and this especially struck me. I’ve been mulling over the idea that diversity does happen naturally. Any people can have babies with other people and those babies are an awesomely combined version of their parents.
I think the real issue is celebrating that diversity versus suppressing it. In the fashion industry, it is OBVIOUSLY suppressed, when really our color and our uniqueness is what makes human beings freaking awesome. By suppressing women and men of color, the fashion industry suppresses our defining features, things we should be proud of. The more the art industries (fashion, film etc.) celebrate color, the more it will be celebrated by the general public.

I just want to say how disgusting I think it is how the Steubenville trial was covered in the media. They went on and on about how the rapists’ lives were ruined… how they were promising football stars and now they’re going to have to register as sex offenders (oh no!) and spend respectively… wait for it… one and two years in juvenile detention. *cue dramatic gasp*. Yeah. And I’m ashamed to say that even CNN, my favorite news outlet, was ridiculous with this. This Upworthy video shows that:

“Asian body shape because they are more flat and less sexy, in a way. Asians, they are not curvy, so to put an Asian [who's] very flat [with a] baby body shape in a show where normally the designer knows they love sexy, beautiful, curvy girls, it’s a bit of nonsense.”

I dont really play many video games apart from occasionally the sims (hello, who hasnt lured all your sims in to the pool then deleted the ladder?!)
but this game looks amazing. All the details like the mixtape and the journals are really cool

Psst! Hey! Can you keep a secret? This month's theme is TRUST, which is about honesty and its opposite, plus so much more. If you’d like to entrust us with an essay or a photo set, comic, poem, short story, or any other pitch you’ve got, please email it to submission@rookiemag.com. ✪

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